Mist and wonder in a magical part of New Zealand
Doubtful Sound is one of the 12 fjords in New Zealand and one of the two that you can visit by boat. All are part of Fiordland National Park, the southwest corner of NZ covering 1.2 million hectares, which was declared a World Heritage Area in 1986. (In NZ, they named them sounds before understanding the difference between sounds and fjords, but they are all fjords so rather than renaming them all, they call the whole area Fiordland – and spell it differently just for extra confusion.)
The only other fjord visited by public boat is Milford Sound, which is far more touristed and which we visit later in the week.
Our place in Manapouri is right in town making for an easy ten minute stroll down to the boat docks for our big day* out on a Doubtful Sound Cruise.
Getting to Doubtful Sound is as much an experience as the actual fjord visit. First we boated across Lake Manapouri, the fifth largest lake in NZ, which is ringed with mountains and rocky cliffs and extremely beautiful in its own right.
As we stepped off the 45 minute boat ride, we decided just that part was worth the whole day’s price.
Then we took a bus ride over the most expensive road in NZ, which cost $2/centimeter to build. This was part of a massive power project that delivers water generated power from this spot down to Bluff (bottom of NZ) to power an aluminum smelter. Shocking and disturbing the lengths man will go to in order to turn earth’s materials into products, but we can’t be too judgmental since its existence is the only reason we can be here.
The only vehicles on this road are the vehicles servicing the power plant and eight tourist buses run by carefully vetted companies.
Along the unsealed road to the top of the sound, we enjoyed beautiful views and informative commentary from our driver, learning about the wildlife, the environment and the volatility of the terrain due to the heavy rainfall the area gets.
We had middling weather as you can see from the photos – not raining (which brings out the temporary waterfalls) but not sunny (for perfect photo ops.) Instead it felt moody and darkly beautiful as rain prepared to fall later in the day. We felt lucky to be able to ride on the top “sun” deck for all three boat rides.
We traveled by boat down to the mouth of the fjord and back, taking about 3 hours for this cruise portion.
It was breathtaking to be surrounded by this beauty and a novelty to us to be sitting still and just absorbing the peace of the place.
More Doubtful Sound Pictures
Then we rode the bus and lake boat in reverse, thoroughly enjoying both and hating for the day to end. We wrapped up the day with a walk along the foreshore from our bach, admiring the forest and lake views from this perspective.
(*You may have noticed that we don’t seem to do a lot of excursions which is true. Even though it seems that we are on vacation, we’re not in one clear way – we’re no longer receiving paychecks. Also, it is an understatement to say that we’re not big fans of crowds. Therefore we try to get the most we can out of a place without the usual tourist activities while spending our tourist dollars in the local economy on accommodations, food, petrol, etc. Today is different though in that there is no way to see Doubtful Sound without going on a cruise.)